I took all that “Mandingo fighting” stuff as Tarantino’s sly commentary on professional sports.
Saw it, loved, will see it again. I agree it kinda bogged down at the end of the second reel, but that’s a nitpick. Mostly I agree with what’s been posted, but I feel that Kings shooting of Candie was meant to be an impulsive move. I don’t think he thought it through and decided it was worth it, he just looked at Candie and he just needed killing sooo bad.
The other point I wanted to add was that the violence, it seems to me, is split between the good guys and the bad guys. What I mean is that the good guys (who are not nice guys) are killing either mostly off screen, like the opening sheriff scene, or are over the top spraying blood in slowmotion to the point of being comical. The latter is visually arresting without really being emotionally impacting. OTOH, the violence done by the bad guys, the fight scene, the dogs, the whipping of the Hilde while Django begs to take her place is far more realistic, and far more visceral and disturbing because of it. The thing that makes it bareable, is that you know they’re going to get their comeuppance, and before the credits roll. It’s like the scene in Kill Bill with the night orderly who brings the trucker into the coma ward. I was watching that, thinking ‘this is so fucking creepy,’ but knowing that she was going to tear his throat out made it ok.
Getting in on this late but the earlier discussion of “who acted better” between Walz and Django should take into account dialogue.
Django is silent for much of the movie and it’s intensely hard to out-act someone who is equally as talented when you can’t speak, or even be flamboyant. Shulz has a very colorful character with some quality lines and situations to work with. Django not as much. I thought the transition from slave to freeman was poorly timed out and there could have been more screentime devoted to the winter season to show how Django transforms and to expose how fallible Sulz is.
I didn’t realize just how restrained he was being in the role of Django until the last two minutes of the film, when the character basically becomes Jaime Foxx himself.
There’s a huge stretch of time at the dinner where Foxx has no lines. I remember thinking he hadn’t had anything to say for minutes.
I did find it a bit of a stretch that Hilde couldn’t play her very basic part at dinner. All she had to do was not make eyes at Django - which for the sake of story is exactly what she did.
Definitely Don Johnson’s best role since Miami Vice.
“Are you saying you want us to treat him like a white man…”
“NO!”
and the “I’m sure we all agree the bags were a good idea but can we just take them off for now?”
Did anybody else pick up on an incestuous hint between Calvin and Laura? They were a bit more kissy than most brothers and sisters.
In retrospect, I don’t know whether to praise or condemn Tarantino for avoiding the obvious set-up: Schultz, having just handed Candie twelve thousand dollars, enthusiastically insults the guy’s ignorance of all things Three Musketeers – and Candie somehow doesn’t fume for a bit before enthusiastically changing the subject: “I do know this much: your check for twelve thousand dollars will buy me another dozen D’Artagnans, followed by another dozen D’Artagnans.”
No, I’m just sayin’ maybe they could’a been done better.
I was rolling through that whole scene. The mockery of the white supremacist/proto-clansmen was fucking hilarious.
I read the Calvin/Laura thing as an emotional incest, Sheba was his sexual victim.
So, I’m the only one whose gaydar was going off a bit with Candie? It’s all probably a little offensive and ridiculous to speculate, but there are a few things. He was a bit more exaggerated in his delicate Southern gentleman attitude than everyone else in the film. He loved to watch big, strong, muscular men wrestle around basically naked for his own enjoyment. Sure, he had Sheba around-- the most beautiful girl-- but you never once saw him do anything even passingly sexual toward her (not even a wanton glance). He wasn’t married (strange for such a rich, powerful man). Even his relationship with his sister seemed less sexual and more very friendly, close in the way all my gay friends kiss and hug on me when they see me. Even his relationship with SLJ struck me as a bit like lovers— especially in how SLJ cried out when Candie was shot (that, of course, can be explained by the fact that SLJ basically raised him).
I don’t know. Like I said, wild (and probably offensive at its very base) speculation, but that’s what crossed my mind during the movie.
I thought it was obvious he was fucking his sister.
Has Kerry Washinton made any public statements about how she felt about the bloody hand on her face scene? Just curious.
Actually, it occured to me that Candie might be gay, but thought , ‘no, he’s just tres genteel.’
That wasn’t DiCaprio’s blood on her face. He cut his hand in one take - which he finished. They kept that take in the film. The shot where Candie rubs his bloody hand all over her face is a separate shot. The hand had since been cleaned and possibly stitched and fake blood was used.
It’d be a GREAT story if it were true, but it’s still a good story nonetheless.
No I agree… It pinged my admittedly not very well tuned gaydar. I even remember looking for a wedding ring on Candie’s hand during the movie. I tried to dismiss it because I didn’t think Tarantino would go for the whole gay depraved man equals evil deal again but who knows? Plus, as was pointed out, there was the beautiful black woman (Sheba?) but there was no remotely sexual anything between the two of them.
Also, not related (ha!): I thought he said that Laura was the wife of his brother -am I remembering incorrectly?
It seemed seamless, as if there had not been more than one take. Certainly, Leo seemed to be in the same “zone” throughout - before, during, and after he smeared the blood on her face. I know he’s a super actor, but I’ll still ask - do you have a cite? Thanks.
Oh, to resurrect another argument from the last page - the bit about why SLJ was so EVIL…
He was essentially white. He was exactly what Django was pretending to be - a black overseer. Django said that a black slaver was thought to be worse than the highest house servant but not by much. You couple that warped mentality with the ersatz father/son relationship that SLJ has for Candie and compound it with antiquated southern attitudes of salvaging honor and xenophobia, then remember that SLJ probably has sour grapes that Hilde “got off easy” from her punishment for escaping and top it all off with the fact that SLJ is inherently a vindictive assholey SOB…
I thought it was interesting that Stephen truly loved Calvin. His cry and reaction when Calvin was killed was some of SLJ’s best acting.
FWIW, my gaydar didn’t ping in the slightest about Candie. He was just a courtly gentleman/monster of the antebellum South.
I’ve enjoyed reading the discussion about Django that’s already been had in this thread. I’d like to raise another topic not directly related to the plot of the movie no one seems to have mentioned. Did anyone notice how ‘un-Tarantino’ this one felt? Granted, you had sudden bouts of intense violence, an expertly mixed soundtrack that seemed to flow into the movie as if it were made to be played over whatever scene it was being played over, gorgeous dialogue that drew you in, etc. But, Tarantino movies have always, at least to me, possessed this sort of surreal element. It was most obvious in Kill Bill Vol. 1 and 2; absurd moments taken totally seriously: The Bride taking out a small army of samurai, the Bride getting shot in the head and coming back to life, the anime origins of Oren Ishii and so on. But all of his other movies also seemed almost cartoonish to me, which I don’t mean as a criticism, since I love his movies. I.e., the whole series of coincidences that constitutes the plot of Pulp Fiction, the grindhouse homage that is Death Proof, the whimsical historical revisionism of Inglorious Basterds.
But with Django Unchained, Tarantino seems to have evolved as a filmmaker beyond the hyper stylized homages of his previous outings. He legitimately made a serious movie about slavery, albeit with the typical Tarantino flair, and I find that fascinating. Whereas scenes from, say, Pulp Fiction or Kill Bill were really just (beautiful) love letters to his favorite films, he seems to have honestly crafted a movie unique to himself. He’s taken the raw skill honed from his first seven movies and unleashed it on something wholly his own. Case in point, I found the flashback when Django first sees one of the Brittle Brothers to be one of the finest sequences he’s ever constructed: the music was perfect, the acting was emotional, the editing was phenomenal. Seeing Django beg to be whipped in place of his wife whilst a song about freedom screams in the background? Fucking beautiful and melancholy and so many things wrapped up in one three minute scene. I love this new Tarantino. I hope he continues to tackle serious subjects with his searing wit and dark comedic sensibilities.
Chinchalinchin, I agree. To pick just two details to underscore your point: the lighting, and the ambient sounds. In almost every scene, to my unexpert eyes, both of these aspects of cinematic art were carefully thought out, not in a show-offy way but in ways integral to the telling of the story and its moods. For all of Tarantino’s gifts, this wasn’t something I recall him caring about before – perhaps because the films he was paying homage to so reverently (in his movies before this one) didn’t really care about these things, either.
I’m not disagreeing with the previous two posts at all, but to add information (and a little opinion) — Tarantino wasn’t making a “serious movie about slavery,” he made an action movie. This I heard from his own lips on NPR as he was forced repeatedly to “defend” making a “serious movie about slavery” and “justify” his use of “nigger” throughout. His interviewer was a very humorless black woman — she said this aloud during the interview. (Well she said she was African American; she didn’t comment on her humorlessness.)
Anyway, my point is that QT says that antebellum slavery was the backdrop and setting for his action movie, not the subject. It uses the elements from that time period to construct a fantastically involving movie. Because it’s a period piece, we look for historical authenticity and because it’s about such a painful part of our past, we look for clues which teach us about our attitudes in the present.
Even having heard the interview prior to seeing the movie, I was given more or less what I needed to know about its “accuracy” in the opening moments when the titles identified the date as being 1858 — two years before the Civil War. Well, not to quibble too much, but the Civil War started in April 1861, so it was more than two years and good lord, doesn’t everyone know when the Civil War started? 
